As a budding writer, apprentice or latent storyteller waiting for something to tell, I have always wanted to ask some authors in their presentations their motives, their inspiration for writing. But when the line moves forward and you meet them with their Fountain pens and they ask you that of For whom? It does not seem appropriate to ask them that pending question ...
Undoubtedly that is why I am passionate about the veiled declarations of intentions of any writer like that voice-over that bursts into the novel. But beyond the anecdotal appearance, the cameo, the metaliterary moment in which the narrator faces the blank page to explain the reason for writing is even better.
Because sometimes authors are encouraged to explain everything, to confess in a book what has led them to "be writers" as a way of life. I mean cases like the very Stephen King with his work «While I write», even the closest Felix Romeo with his «Why I write».
In both works, each author addresses the idea of writing as a very personal life channel that unpredictably leads to something like surviving to tell about it. And the matter has nothing to do with a more commercial will or an ultimately more transcendental interest. It is written because it is necessary to write, and if not, as it also points out in this regard Charles BukowskiYou better not get into it.
You can write a masterpiece by chance if you are convinced you have something interesting or suggestive to tell. There we have Patrick Süskind, Salinger or Kennedy Toole. None of the three got over the masterpiece syndrome the first time. But they surely did not have anything more interesting to tell.
It may be that it is written because the strangest things happen to you. Or at least that is the perception of what was lived that King teaches us in the confession of his vocation as a book. Or it can be written because of the rabid disenchantment and the healthy will to detach oneself from the tedious sensation of the generality, from the tumult of the demands of the masses, as Félix Romeo seems to outline us.
The point is that in such direct and extensive confessions of the narrative trade, as well as in small flashes like those offered by Joel Dicker in "The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair," for example, every fan of writing finds himself in front of that marvelous mirror where the taste for black on white makes all the sense.